by Melvyn Bragg
But the hierarchy could not bear it. In 1412, twenty-eight years after Wycliffe’s death, the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered all of Wycliffe’s works to be burned and in a letter to the Pope entered a list of two hundred sixty-seven heresies “worthy of the fire” which he claimed to have culled from the pages of Wycliffe’s Bible. He is quoted as having said, “That wretched and pestilent fellow, son of the Serpent, herald and child of Antichrist, John Wycliffe, filled up the measure of his malice by divining the expedient of a new translation of Scripture in the mother tongue.”
Today, in a much more secular age, the question arises — why all this fury? What had he done? Perhaps he would have been pardoned if he had been the Oxford classical scholar content to concentrate solely on translating the Bible? Perhaps if he had not gone for the Church’s throat, challenged its worldly existence, stirred his theological criticisms into the social upheaval which followed the Black Death? Then would he have managed to slip English through the west door, down the nave and on to the imperial lectern holding the Bible? It is doubtful. For reasons sincere and cynical, Latin was held to be the language of the Holy Book and ever more must be kept inviolate. Wycliffe had threatened the very voice of the Universal Church of the One Invisible God. It is a terrible example of the power in language.
The Church was not finished with him yet. The Emperor Sigismund, King of Hungary, called together the Council of Constance in 1414. It was the most imposing council ever called by the Catholic Church. In 1415 Wycliffe was condemned as a heretic and in the spring of 1428 it was commanded that his bones be exhumed and removed from consecrated ground.
With the Primate of England looking on, Wycliffe’s remains were disinterred and burned, thus, presumably, it was thought, depriving him of any possibility of eternal life. For when the Last Judgement came and the bodies of the dead rose up to meet those souls chosen to live with God, Wycliffe would be unable to reunite body and soul and so, if he had not already perished in hell, as they prayed for and hoped, he would certainly perish at the last.
The Bible remained in Latin and Wycliffe’s failed attempt was an implacable and damning lesson to anyone foolish enough to attempt to mount another unholy attack on the side of English.
Wycliffe’s remains were burned on a little bridge that spanned the River Swift, which was a tributary of the Avon. His ashes were thrown into the stream. Soon afterwards a Lollard prophecy appeared:
The Avon to the Severn runs,
The Severn to the sea.
And Wycliffe’s dust shall spread abroad
Wide as the waters be.
In English.
8
English and the Language of the State
Thwarted on one front, English turned its energy on another. It had lost the battle for the soul, now it would take on the body politic. It was a struggle catalysed by one of the greatest of all technological inventions, printing. Its English master, Caxton, would do more to regularise a Standard English than his bestselling author, Chaucer. It was a struggle in which anonymous clerks in the civil service of the day would exercise more power than kings. This was England coming through the Middle Ages, battle-weary and battle-hungry in a seemingly endless war against France, an England in which kings led from the front, and it was one of the greatest of these warrior-kings, Henry V, who, like Alfred the Great, used English to unite the English.
A key moment was in his letters home from Agincourt — here in Modern English. “Right trusty and well beloved brother,” he wrote, after that famous victory, “right worshipful fathers in God and trusty and well beloved, for as much as we know well that your desire were to hear joyful tidings of our good speed touching the conclusion of peace between the two realms, ... we signify unto you that . . . our labour has sent us a good conclusion.” In Henry’s own English, it reads: “Right trusty and welbeloved broþer Right worschipfull and worschipfull faders in god and truest and welbeloved ffor as muche as we wote wele þat youre desire were to here Ioyfull tidings of oure goode spede touching þe conclusion of pees betwixt þe two Rewmes . . . we signiffie vnto yow þat . . . of oure labour haþ sent vs a goode conclusion.”
A letter may seem a small thing but the cliché of little acorns and oaks is appropriate, especially as it was the English bowmen with their hearts of oak who turned the battle. In writing his despatches home in English, Henry V broke with three hundred fifty years of royal tradition. This proved an astute move. Under his father, Henry IV, English kings had begun to speak English but all court documents had hitherto been written in French as they had been since 1066. Henry’s letters can be seen either as the final acceptance of the tongue of the land by those who ruled it or as deliberate propaganda, written in the vernacular the easier to be spread throughout the land.
Here he writes about the peace treaty in 1420:
upon moneday þe 20th day of þis present moneþ of May we arrived in þis town of Troyes . . . and þaccorde of þe said pees perpetuelle was þere sworne by boþe þe saide Commissaires . . . And semblably by us in oure owne name. And þe letters (þerupon) forwiþ enseled under þe grete seel of oure saide fader to us warde and under oures to hyum warde þe copie of whiche lettres we sende you closed yn þees to þat ende: þat ye doo þe saide accorde to be proclamed yn oure Citee of london and þorowe al oure Rewme þat al oure pueple may have verray knowledge þereof for þare consolacion . . . henry by þe grace of god kyng of England heire and Regent of þe Rewme of ffrance and lorde of Irelande
Upon Monday the 20th day of May we arrived at this town Troyes . . . and the accord of the peace perpetual was here sworn by the Duke of Burgundy and semblably by us in our own name, the letters forthwith sealed under the Great Seal, copies of which we send to be proclaimed in our City of London and through all our realm that our people may have knowledge thereof for their consolation . . . Signed. Henry, by the grace of God, King of England.
He was on the side of public opinion as anti-French fervour was once again at a high pitch. Victories over those who had conquered “us” and then become part of “us” carried a complicated sweetness. But when he returned from his campaigns, Henry Plantagenet continued to write in English. He even used it in his will. In doing so he made the first major step towards the creation of an official standardised English that everyone could read. For where the king led, his people followed, in peace as in war.
The principal residence of the monarchy was the Palace of Westminster — today better known as the Houses of Parliament. The enormous hammer-beamed Hall survived the great fire of 1834, and in that Great Hall would have been the first circle of government which would have included the Signet Office.
This office wrote personal letters on behalf of the monarch, which carried the royal seal. Henry decreed that the Signet Office should use English. This provided at last a breach in the walls guarding the citadel of French; English poured through it. French was dispossessed of the language of office. It must have felt itself to be as invulnerable as one of its deep-walled Norman castles or its high unscalable keeps. Now the French language was routed as significantly as the French cavalry had been slain at Agincourt. English became the language of rule and English clerks gained control.
But which English was it to be? Across the country a great number of dialects were spoken and people would still have had trouble understanding each other. The obstinacy of the English dialects is as impressive as the capacity of English to standardise, to absorb and to spread around the world. Almost one thousand years after the Anglo-Saxons had arrived with what was the fundament of the language, a man from Northumberland could still have the greatest difficulty in understanding a man from Kent. This local tenacity and loyalty continued for centuries and in certain areas it perseveres. It is like an ineradicable counterpoint. We have a world language but a Geordie can still baffle a resident of Tunbridge Wells a mere three hundred miles away, as he did in Caxton’s day.
The word “stone” in the south was “ston,” not “stane” as in the nort
h. “Running” was spoken in the north as “runnand.” It appears as “runnende” in the East Midlands and as “runninde” in the West Midlands. Runnand, runnende and runninde: add the singular twang of a local accent and it is possible to imagine even words as close as this coming out confusingly different.
But the pronunciation was nothing compared with the variety of spelling in use. If you look at a spelling map of the day it reads — spell as you speak. Because England had used Latin traditionally and French for over three hundred years as the written languages, there had never been any need to agree on a common linguistic standard for its native tongue or even how to spell particular words. Now there was.
The variety was profligate. Take the word “church” for instance, one of the most common in the language. In the north of England at that time it was commonly called a “kirk” while the south used “church.” However, according to the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, “kirk” could be spelled “kyrk,” “kyrke,” “kirke,” “kerk,” “kirc,” “kric,” “kyrck,” “kirche” and “kerke”; “church” was variously “churche,” “cherche,” “chirche,” “cherch,” “chyrch,” “cherge,” “chyrche,” “chorche,” “chrch,” “churiche,” “cirche.” And then there were “schyrche,” “scherch,” “scherche,” “schirche,” “schorche,” “schurch,” “schurche,” “sscherch.”
This magnificent fertility of English spelling was everywhere. There were over five hundred ways of spelling the word “through” and over sixty of the pronoun “she,” which is quite hard to imagine.
The word “people” could be spelled “peple,” “pepule,” “pepul,” “pepull,” “pepulle,” “pepille,” “pepil,” “pepylle,” “pepyll,” “peeple,” “peopel,” “poepull,” “poeple,” “poepul,” “puple,” “pupile,” “pupill,” “pupyll,” “pupul,” “peuple,” or “pople.” The word “receive” appears as “rasawe,” “rassaif,” “rassave,” “recave,” “receave,” “receawe,” “receiuf,” “receve,” “receyf,” “receive,” “reciffe,” “recive,” “recyve,” “resaf,” “resaif,” “resaiff,” “resaive,” “resave,” “resawe,” “resayfe,” “resayff,” “resayve,” “resywe,” “rescaive,” “rescayve,” “resceive,” “resceve,” “rescewe,” “resceyve,” “reschave,” “reschayfe,” “rescheyve,” “rescyve,” “reseve,” “reseyve,” “ressaif,” “ressaive,” “ressave,” “ressawe,” “ressayf,” “ressayve,” “resseve,” “resseyve” and “reycive.” For local pride it was a glorious proof of individuality. For central authority it was a nightmare and worse, beyond control.
The scribes of Westminster took it on in the Chancellery, the big engine of state, shortened to “Chancery.” This was a huge office responsible for the paperwork involved in running the kingdom. It was a cross between today’s Law Courts, the Tax Office and Whitehall, and the scribes knew that it was crucial that a document produced in London could be read three hundred miles north in Carlisle as Latin and French had been.
A common written language was needed and Chancery was well equipped to provide one. It was strictly hierarchical. There were twelve senior clerks, the “first form,” known as the Masters of Chancery. The “second form” had another twelve clerks. Below them were twenty-four cursitors, and below them an army of sub-clerks who copied documents but had no power to initiate, draft or sign them. It was the birth or, if we reach back to Alfred’s not dissimilar set-up, the rebirth of English governmental bureaucracy.
If you visit the Public Record Office today you can see thousands of official documents kept from the fifteenth century. In these dry scrolls written English was fashioned. Hundreds of decisions had to be made about which form of word and which spelling to adopt. The final decisions were most likely in the hands of the Masters. The fact that many of these documents had legal status reinforced the necessity for consistency. Evidence had to have sound words widely understood. Even the most commonplace words — “any,” “but,” “many,” “cannot,” and “ought” — had to be given a consistent form which in all these cases and thousands more is the modern form. “I” became “I”; previously “ich” (and many other variants) had also been allowed. “Suche” was preferred to “sich,” “sych,” “seche,” “swiche” and, again, many other variants. “Lond” became “land,” although this took a long time to be settled. During the decade 1469–79 alone, for instance, the modern word “shall” appears in the peculiarly East Anglian form of “xal,” then “schal” before settling into the word we all use now. “Righte” became “right.” “Hath” and “doth” were retained until the nineteenth century, but their eventual replacements appear as “has” and “does.” The Masters of Chancery had no qualms about taking on literary genius either: they preferred “not” to Chaucer’s “nat,” “but” for his “bot,” “these” for “thise,” “thorough” for “thurgh.” The men from Westminster knew best. This standard still admits of a lot of variation and we are not going to see a spoken standard until much later, but English was being square-bashed into its first drilled lines.
Chancery English, partly, it appears, because of the flow of people into London from the Midlands and the employment of a number of them as scribes, shows the influence of the Central and East Midlands dialects as well as that associated with London. So it could claim, when it emerges as the material of a literary language after about 1500, that it drew on a bigger reservoir than that of the metropolitan poets, even the author of The Canterbury Tales. London, with forty thousand people, was by far the biggest city in the country. But forty thousand people could be seriously affected by a determined group of immigrants. “Chancery Standard” significantly shaped the English word standard and once again we see the continuous democratic element in the growth of the English language. This first great disciplining into standard was achieved by scores of anonymous men, attempting to clarify and refine the way we used the words we spoke when we transferred them to writing.
Nor was it only in official documents that English was welling over the land. In the fifteenth-century letters of a Norfolk family, the Paston Letters, of which there are over a thousand, we see how the native language has become second nature to educated persons. It is difficult to decide whether such widespread usage came because of the example set at the top or the top took its cue from widespread usage. English was not only the language of state but the written and preferred language of the class of people most expected to be the state’s closest supporters.
Yet just because the spelling was being regularised did not always mean that it was being simplified or made to follow rules of common sense. There is a scroll of doggerel in many school classrooms today which reads:
We’ll begin with a box and the plural is boxes.
But the plural of ox should be oxen not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese.
Yet the plural of mouse should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice.
But the plural of house is houses not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
The cow in a plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows and not vine.
And I speak of foot and you show me your feet,
But I give you a boot . . . would a pair be called beet? . . .
This reflects the survival of old plural forms (ox, oxen), historical sound changes in Old English words (foot, feet), and loan words adopting “s” as a plural (vows). Broadly, there were reformers who wanted to spell words according to the way they were pronounced and traditionalists who wanted to spell them in one of the ways they always had been.
There was another party, however. We could call them the Tamperers. In a desire to make the roots of the language more evident and perhaps give it more style, more class, some words that had entered English from French were later given a Latin look. The letter “b”
was inserted into “debt” and “doubt,” the letter “c” equally unnecessarily into “victuals.” Words thought to be of Greek origin sometimes had their spelling adjusted so that “throne” or “theatre” acquired their “h”; “rhyme” on the other hand was awarded its “h” just because “rhythm” had one. On a similar principle or whim, an “l” was inserted into “could” because it was still present — as a silent “l” — in “should” and “would.” In the sixteenth century this became a fad designed to winnow out the under-educated, stump children and fox foreigners.
Yet some of the English have come to an exasperated love and pride for these illogical irregularities as the doggerel concludes:
The masculine pronouns are he, his and him
But imagine the feminine she, shis and shim!
So our English, I think you’ll all agree
Is the trickiest language you ever did see.
The Tamperers were attempting in their way to bring reason to bear on the development of the language. English has never been very partial to reason and as if to prove it, at the same time as the “b”s and the silent “l”s and “h”s were being smuggled into perfectly sound words, the Great Vowel Shift occurred which resulted in many of the English pronouncing most things differently anyway.
When properly read aloud, the fourteenth-century English of Chaucer sounds strange to modern ears in a way that, on the whole, the late sixteenth-century English of Shakespeare does not. For example, Chaucer’s way of saying “name” would have rhymed with the modern “calm,” his “fine” with our “seen”; he would have pronounced “meet” more or less as we would pronounce “mate,” “do” as “doe,” and “cow” as “coo” (as it is still pronounced in parts of Scotland).
